If you’re unfamiliar with the awesomeness that is 20% reduction in Magic Damage let me assure you that it has probably been the most utilized set bonus I’ve ever experienced. I only had it for a few weeks, but the capacity to live through huge magic hits (or to simply make my healer’s job easier) is pretty awesome.

Needless to say, despite the fact that I replaced my Conqueror’s Siegebreaker Greathelm, I’m still keeping it around for certain encounters. This is hardly an exhaustive list, but let me run by a few “must haves”:

Ignis Trash.

Ignis (Rounding up Adds, or Ignis Himself)

Assembly of Iron (Particularly if going for Hard-mode)

Malygos

Sartharion 3D

Lord Jarraxus

Most of Heroic Nexus

Most of Heroic Occulus

I am sure I will find more uses as time goes on. Of course, this will lead to situations where I will find myself saying “Crap! I don’ t have my 4-piece bonus anymore!” As I can’t remember a set bonus in the past having that kind of effect on me, I feel pretty sure that is an indication of something.

That something being this needs to be an innate part of the Shield Block ability.

This isn’t exactly something revolutionary. Warriors have been clamoring for greater ability to reduce magical damage ever since Death Knights and their Anti-Magic abilities proved how useful they are. In addition, this seems to me like it should be an easily implementable, as it already exists as an option for Warriors in the first place.

Perhaps this is wishful thinking about a subject I’ve mused upon before. I don’t exactly have a stellar record of compelling Blizzard to buff my favorite class. But seriously, is this so much to ask? I’d give up Spell Reflect for it in a heartbeat.

As I mentioned in Monday’s post, Rage, as a system, is downright broken. The mechanic is unsustainable without introducing constant tweaks and nerfs. It needs to be replaced. Scrapped. Put out of its misery.

Or what have you.

But what should replace rage? If you were to turn rage into a resource generated over time, you simply have Energy, ala Rogues. If you make it too finite a resource, you end up with something too much like Mana. So what can used that maintains that kind of frantic fast paced play we’ve come to expect?

Personally, I think looking for a resource to manage is a red herring. We need something dramatically different. We need…

We’ve had two revelations about Warriors recently that should be an important study of videogame design. First we have the revelation about the limitations of rage mechanics, and second we have the impact of rage mechanics on Warrior gear design.

To wit:

This really just gets back to the way rage works, which is that damage leads to rage so you have to pick a point at which you balance warriors. High damage and high rage? Low damage and low rage? The way to fix it is to normalize rage even more so that you always get X rage per second regardless of gear. But once you always get X rage per second you essentially just have rogue energy. So, as with the previous question, we don’t like the way it is working and want to change it but we don’t have a perfect substitute in the can just yet.

Ghostcrawler has implied that Blizzard has an issue with RNG mechanics, at least as far as players are concerned. I can understand this on principle: deciding the results of a battle by a roll of the dice is not a fair measure of skill. I would imagine that this is the purpose of PvP.

That said, I cannot help but notice that Blizzard has developed a kind of fetish for developing encounters dependent on randomness. My frustration with this can perhaps only be matched by a priest caught in the sights of a mace-spec rogue. I must inquire what bright mind in arguably one of the greatest game studios in the world thought this was a good idea.